Keeping Track of Meals

I’m a planner. Sometimes, I’m an obsessive planner, especially when we take long road trips. This long a** road trip also requires me to be frugal so this is actually a planning petson’s heaven.

I needed a good strategy for knowing how much food will have to go into my vehicle’s two coolers, how many days in between grocery shopping trips and how much money each leg of the trip has for the budget. The calendar below is my answer to my brain’s constant quest for order.

Each different colored section represents a different leg of the trip. At the start of each new leg, we have to replenish food supplies.

The “L” and “D” stand for Lunch and Dinner. There’s no Breakfast listed because we have meal replacement shakes.

The “M” stands for each meal that has a budget of $10 for the four of us. The “$” stands for restaurant meals that have a budget of $50, with the locations or reasons why we would want to eat at a restaurant.

For the trip to last as long as it will, we have to be very frugal with our food budget.

Why meal replacement shakes? Mainly because I can buy a pack of 4, for $5 on Amazon, which is half the price of a regular meal. Secondly, the shakes are very low carb so it helps me to manage my daily carb count of 50-75 carbs.

Here’s my massive quantity of shakes. I bought them all at once because I saved $12 a box, over buying them at a Walgreens along the way. They take up quite a bit of space but as we drink them, we’ll get the previous space back. 👍

For the cold foods, we bought enough ground beef to make burger patties for two meals. We also made ham and cream cheese wraps for two meals. To break up the monotony of burgers and ham wraps, we have one meal of spicy Italian sausage.

We also have some dry foods to eat along with the cold stuff. As you can tell, the dry foods are quite a bit higher in carbs but for the most part, they’re quality carbs and everything is portioned. I generally try to keep around 20 carbs for meals and snacks.

Hopefully, we can do a pretty good job of sticking to our plan. We shall see! 😊